- ATLANTA (AP) -- The sexually
transmitted disease gonorrhea is now among the "superbugs" resistant
to common antibiotics, leading U.S. health officials to recommend wider
use of a different class of drugs to avert a public health crisis.
-
- The resistant form accounts for more than one in every
four gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in Philadelphia and nearly
that many in San Francisco, according to a survey that led to Thursday's
recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
-
- Gonorrhea, which is believed to infect more than 700,000
people in the United States each year, can leave both men and women infertile
and puts people at higher risk of getting the
- AIDS virus.
-
- Since the early 1990s, a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones
has provided a relatively easy cure. These antibiotics, taken as tablets,
include the drug Cipro.
-
- But a growing number of gonorrhea cases is resistant
to those drugs, and officials at the
- CDC for the first time are urging doctors to stop using
fluoroquinolones and switch to cephalosporins, a different class of antibiotics,
to treat everyone.
-
- Those drugs - which include the generic ceftriaxone or
brand name Rocephin, made by Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG - must be
given as a shot and aren't as readily stocked as Cipro on most doctor's
shelves.
-
- "Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs
for which treatment options have become dangerously few," said Dr.
Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America. "To
make a bad problem even worse, we're also seeing a decline in the development
of new antibiotics to treat these infections."
-
- The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering
that nearly 7 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in a survey
of 26 U.S. cities last year were drug-resistant. In 2001, only about 0.6
percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant.
-
- "That leaves us with a single class of highly effective
antibiotics," said Dr. John Douglas Jr., director of the CDC's division
of STD prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous.
-
- "We are running out of options to treat this disease,"
added Douglas, who said there are "no new drugs for gonorrhea in the
drug development pipeline."
-
- Previously, CDC recommended against fluoroquinolones
to treat drug-resistant gonorrhea among men who have sex with men and in
certain states, including California and Hawaii where most of these cases
were turning up.
-
- Described by Douglas as a "very wily" disease,
gonorrhea has worked its way through decades of other treatment regimens,
from sulfa drugs used in the 1930s and 1940s, to penicillin, which was
used from the 1940s until the mid-1980s.
-
- Gonorrhea, spread through sexual contact, is the second
most commonly reported infectious disease in the United States, trailing
only chlamydia, which the CDC says affects more than 2.1 million people
yearly in the U.S.
-
- The highest rates of infection are among sexually active
teens, young adults and African-Americans. Because many people don't have
obvious symptoms, they can unknowingly spread it to others. And having
it makes people more susceptible to
- HIV. Gonorrhea's spread is preventable through consistent
and proper use of condoms, experts said.
-
- In women, the infection can cause pelvic inflammatory
disease. In men, it can cause epididymitis, a painful condition of the
testicles that can lead to infertility if untreated, the CDC said.
-
- In the survey of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men
in 26 cities last year, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of drug-resistant
cases with almost 27 percent, a dramatic increase from only 1.2 percent
in 2004.
-
- San Francisco's drug-resistant cases more than doubled
between 2004 and 2006, from 10.3 percent to 22.5 percent. During the same
period, Miami's cases spiked from 2.1 percent to 15.3 percent and Atlanta's
climbed from 1 percent to 5.7 percent.
-
-
- Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD
- Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics
- Univ of West Indies
-
-
-
- Please visit my "Emerging Diseases" message
board at:
- http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php
- Also my new website:
- http://drpdoyle.tripod.com/
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
- Go with God and in Good Health
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